Germany East: Leipzig

Editor's note: Having researched and written a series of posts for our up-coming trip to San Francisco, and having already purchased tickets for my next trip to Germany (late May/early June), I figure I had better finish up with the posts from the previous trip. This is the penultimate entry I had planned, and I've taken advantage of the end of Spring Break to put the finishing touches on them both for you. The other one will appear on Wednesday.

German National Library

I spent the last two weeks of my January research trip in Leipzig, at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library). This private institution is in the southeastern corner of the city and abuts the Alte Messegelände (Old Trade Show Grounds). The German National Library celebrated its centenary last year, and its magnificent building will be 100 years old in 2016. It still amazes me that Germans continued to do things like build libraries during World War I. Back then it was called the Deutsche Bücherei.

The first morning in Leipzig I woke up to a fresh blanket of snow:

Iconic double Ms at the eastern entrance

For a variety of reasons I chose not to live in the same Haus I did back in May 2011, so I was happy to discover a small Pension just a 10-minute walk away. The Messegelände is 100 years old this year, and the buildings that aren't being torn down for being too old (or ugly--quite a few date to the Communist period) are being re-purposed. A number of Christian associations have purchased Building 14 and use it for worship, a school, a community center, and to house some missionaries. The first-floor cafe and third-floor hostel (Cafe/Pension 14) are run by a Christian businessman a little older than I am. He remembers when only the party elite were allowed to come to events at the Messegelände.

Herr Stiehl and I had a lot of opportunities to talk, since I was the only one at breakfast. Most tenants at the hostel are factory workers and feed themselves from the primitive guest kitchen upstairs. I wanted to start the day with a hefty breakfast that I could stretch into a second meal, so I paid extra for a spread like the one in the photo. It included tea, orange juice, two rolls, meat, cheese, jam, jogurt, muesli, several fresh fruits, and sometimes a soft-boiled egg. I slipped a sandwich and piece of fruit into my bag for later. For my other meals I used the large discount grocery store in Building 11 next door.


Among other anniversaries being celebrated, last year was the 300^th birthday of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and this year Richard Wagner would have been 200. Even though he is most associated with Bayreuth in nearby Bayern (Bavaria), Wagner is a native Sachsen (Saxon). He was born on 22 May 1813 in Leipzig and lived here for two years, until his stepfather moved the family to Dresden. Leipzig is making a big deal about it, having concerts and exhibitions and the like. I didn't catch any of those, but one Saturday night I did go to the famous Gewandhaus to hear what I assume was the final performance of the semester of the student orchestra. They were pretty good--and played "the can-can" as an encore, complete with students in local skirts and knee-high socks doing a silly dance.

Finally, 2013 is 200 years since the Battle of Nations, the decisive battle between Napoleon Bonaparte and the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden, fought on the flat land just south of Leipzig. (Saxony fought with the French. Oops.) It was the largest battle in Europe before World War I and marked the decisive end of Napoleon's European campaign. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of that momentous event, in 1913 Emperor Wilhelm III dedicated the Völkerschlachtdenkmal. (The next time French soldiers would cross the Rhine River int Germany was toward the end of WWI.) This monstrosity of a monument turns 100 later this year, and there are celebrations planned for October. 

Sunrise at the Monument to the Battle of Nations

Who else is celebrating a big anniversary this year? Tell us in the comments!

Images of Research

Every year one of my campuses holds an Images of Research competition among its graduate students. The first year they announced this, I couldn't help but observe to them that they were privileging the sciences over the humanities, as biologists and physicists create images all the time in their research, whereas literary scholars and historians tend to work with texts. Although I frequently use images in my own work, these were overwhelming made by someone else, either a historical subject or an archivist (and therefore not eligible for the competition). Nevertheless, while in Germany in 2011, I decided to create an image to submit. It didn't win or even place, but I came across it today while looking for something else. Here it is, for your amusement and edification.

As an MD/PhD Candidate in History, I spend a lot of time translating: from basic science into clinical practice, from scholarly work into lessons for undergraduate students, from German into English. I snapped this image while researching my dissertation on theories about nutrition and bodies in the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden, Germany. It shows pages on the physiology of vision from the fifth and final volume of German-American physician-author Fritz Kahn’s illustrated encyclopedia, Das Leben des Menschen (The Life of Man: A Popular Anatomy, Biology, Physiology and Developmental History of Humans, 1922-1931). The first feature-length 3D film, The Power of Love, had come out in 1922, and the first 3D film in color was an untitled movie shot at the 1936 National Garden Show in Dresden. 3D technology is also about translating, in this case, off-set two-dimensional images into vivid three-dimensional ones. As an added bonus, the film inserts in the cardboard 3D “glasses” are blue and orange, the colors of my home campus. 

(The caption under the dromedaries reads "Das plastische Sehen": "’Three-dimensional Vision’ in the anaglyph technique of Ducos du Hauron [explanation on facing page, p. 113]. Original photograph by Councilor Hermann Lüscher.” The adjective plastisch has additional meanings of “vivid” and “malleable.”)

Homemade "noodles"

Unsurprisingly, in the course of my research on the history food and nutrition in early twentieth-century Germany, I find myself resorting to the internet to teach me things about food my grandmother or great-grandmother might have known--but by virtue of growing up in a generation with pre-packaged foods, I do not. For instance, one of the more interesting discoveries (to me) is that freshly laid chicken eggs come with their own "packaging," if you will--a slimy layer that seals the pores in the egg shell and help it keep longer. I bet you didn't know that egg shells had pores: cool, huh? Needless to say, whether factory-farmed or gathered by your local small-holding farmer, eggs are washed before being packaged into handy cartons and shipped off to the grocery store (or farmers market).

Something else that sent me off to the interwebs was an instruction in a manual for World War I soup kitchens to leave a good hour for noodles to cook. Now, a century ago Germans were cooking the stuffing out of the fruits and vegetables in the name of "digestibility." Naturally they didn't have any taste after boiling for 30 or 60 or 120 minutes (cabbage took the longest), so they had to serve their veggies with butter, salt, nutmeg, and all sorts of sauces just to give them some flavor! So on the one hand it didn't surprise me to read that noodles should cook for hour, but since I had never made them by scratch before, I looked up various recipes online.

Sure enough, the consensus was that noodles were easy to make out of flour, egg, +/- some milk, and that they would cook in just 5-10 minutes. With the encouragement of friends on facebook, I decided to give it a try when we ran out of packaged noodles for Dear Husband's mother's chicken soup without the chicken. (The meat is cut up and used for other dishes, while the broth is served with noodles.) Using this recipe, I mixed the three ingredients in a bowl with a wooden spoon until that seemed futile, at which point I switched to using my hands, which allowed me to feel the stickiness of the dough. I stopped at about 1 3/4 cups flour, rolled out the dough, cut it, and pulled the noodles apart.

Here they are, all cut out with a plastic doohickey I have in the drawer. (I didn't want to damage the countertop.) They only dried about 10 minutes before I plopped them into a small pot of boiling water, since DH had to get to a wedding rehearsal at 6.

Whoops--they get bigger when they cook! DH joked that I was inventing a new, fusion dish: American, country-style chicken soup with wonton noodles.

The noodles were still on the stove when DH returned from the wedding rehearsal. He said the one he tried tasted like a dumpling. It turns out the noodles were so thick that they needed to cook for more than hour after all.

When they were finally "done" (a little past al dente), they did not quite have the "velvety" texture the blog author above advertised. The outsides were falling apart, leaving a glutenous, gluey mass in the bottom of the pot, and the insides weren't quite soft. Next time I'll flour the counter, roll the dough out nice and thiiiiiin, use a pizza cutter to make the noodles, and cook them in a bigger pot. I'll bet my grandmother would have known better!

Dresden: Then

As counterpart to my Dresden: Now blog post about contemporary art, "Dresden: Then: concerns a museum trip I made my last day in Dresden to the Panometer Dresden. Yadegar Asisi uses a computer and photographic or historical images to create enormous 360-degree panoromas of ancient Pergamon and Rome, Mount Everest, or the Amazon rainforest. They've been exhibited in Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin. Each panaroma is printed on an enormous piece of canvas and hung as a cylinder. Asisi has manipulated the images so that the best perspective is from a stand in the middle, as if you were standing in a tower. He's done two historical versions of the Saxon capital, both in the eighteenth century of Augustus the Strong. The first one was supposed to be a snapshot from 1756. The second one combines various real persons/events with a general feel for the time period; in particular it plays with light. The "sun" rises and sets, there's a thunderstorm, and at night you can see the light of "candles" in the windows. These are photos I took (without flash).

This is the bridge that August built.

You might remember from an earlier post that August II was an Elector in the Holy Roman Empire. After the Thirty Years War (1618-1848), Saxony was declared Protestant from the Elector on down to the lowliest serf. Well, Augustus wanted to be king of Poland, which was/is a Catholic country, and he was okay with converting in order to purchase the crown (1697). (His poor wife was not, however, and she wrote tearful letters to him and their son about her prayers for their immortal souls.) The rest of Saxony was allowed to remain Protestant (breaking the rules of the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648).

Augustus needed someplace to worship, so the Hofkirche (court church) was built, with an elevated, enclosed walkway to the Residenz, so he wouldn't disturb the Bürgers going to and from mass everyday. This is the view from the top of the observation tour as if you were standing on the top of the tower of the Hofkirche. The "Kathedrale" has white statues around the outside of disciples, saints, and Church fathers. On the right-hand side, in the shadow of the breaking dawn, is the tower of the Residenz. Further to the left is the rest of the Altstadt. The Elbe River is behind and to the right. In the background lie the half-finished grounds of the Zwinger.





Here is a better view of one of the statues around the roof, and below is a famous itinerant preacher (I forget his name and schtick) and Clara, the Indian rhinoceros (she visited in 1747). There are lots and lots of details like this to be seen all around the panometer. There is a free guide for some of them--or you could buy the book to see them all.

"Behind" that group, higher on the cylinder, is this shot of the gate of the Zwinger. This area was originally part of the city's fortifications. Then, at the end of the 17th century, Louis XIV had just moved the French court to Versailles, and August II wanted something similar. It was supposed to be an oval palace surrounding gardens. Begun in the early 1700s, it was three-fourths complete when Augustus died (1733). His son's court abandoned the project. Just over a century later (1847-1855) Gottfried Semper was hired to design an art gallery to fill the last fourth of the oval (and the opera house in the square to the right.

Finally, there has long been a sort of rivalry between the Hofkirche and the big Protestant church nearby: a little earlier the Frauenkirche was being re-built as a monument to Protestantism--yes, even with a name like Church of Our Lady! Here it rises majestically above the red rooftops of the Altstadt. This is a good quarter turn to the left from the first image and was also taken in "the morning hours."



 

These are the images of "Dresden: Then" that came out the best. I hope they've given you a good sense of Baroque Dresden and the panometer as a neat way of presenting images. Next up: Leipzig!

Snowy Postcard

Some of you have gotten more snow than you would like, and some of you have gotten less. This snowy postcard is for the latter group. Thursday just after 4pm, it started hailing noisy little pellets that made the streets and rooftops white. Then the big fat snowflakes started. By the time darkness had fallen, we had received a good 2-3 inches. Friday some melted, but then temps dove back into the 20s F, so we've got just enough of the white stuff for backyards to be pretty and sidewalks to be a mess.

Here are two shots out our front windows from Friday morning, before DH shoveled and before the streets were plowed.

There's a double-wide driveway somewhere under there...

Now that most of my departmental committee work is done, I should have some time to finish composing the posts about my trip to Germany. Consider this a placeholder until then. Wherever you are, stay warm and safe!

Dresden: Now

This is the first of two posts about Dresden, where I spent two weeks of my recent trip to Germany. I lived there for 7 months in 2010-2011, and I really appreciated the chance to re-connect with some of the friends I made then and there. I didn't spend all of my time in the archive and library--just most of it. For breaks I enjoyed some of Dresden's artistic offerings. One night, I attended the opening of a gallery show by a friend of my hostess. The artist paints in the porcelain factory at Meissen by day and at night creates her own fantasy and floral watercolors. I wish she had a website so I could share some of her beautiful pieces.

This is the Main State Archive of Saxony, where I did a lot of work.

Another night, my hostess and I bought last-minute tickets to the Semperoper, the beautiful old theater in the Altstadt named after its architect, Gottfried Semper (1803-1879). The building was destroyed once by fire in 1869 and again by the fire-bombing in 1945; the 2002 flood also caused some damage, but it has been wonderfully restored. (The "marble" interior has always been fake, but it's quite convincing.) The ticket prices were rather steep, even at the door, so CF and I got Hörplätze. What good, you may ask, is a listening seat for a ballet? Excellent question. Our seats were in the highest section on the far right, such that the right third of the stage was obscured from view. There were still quite a few seats available on the floor, so during the first intermission, we moved down there (with the permission of the ushers). Imagine that: front-row seats at the ballet for 7.50 EU each!

Neither of us knew what we were seeing (we declined to pay for a program), but I think I enjoyed it more than CF did, who is a little older and fairly conventional in her tastes--much like the art scene in Dresden. It turned out that on the program for that night were four selections under the heading "BallteRusse: Reloaded." (Sounds like a James Bond movie title!) Each piece had been originally created for the Russian Ballet but was being performed by the local company.

The first piece, "Noces," was completely modern in music, choreography, and staging. It began in complete silence that was replaced by the stomping of the dancers and eventually by the dissonant tones of a choir. About a farmer's wedding in the country, it came off to me like a satire on love and relationships, what with the way the guests manipulated "the happy couple." CF didn't like it at all, but I at least was intrigued by the variety of shapes and forms the human body can assume.

"Faun," the second piece, was also modern, using the music of Claude Debussy to tell the sordid tale of the illicit lust of a priest for a choir boy. I think my companion "liked" this one, as it wasn't as "ugly" as the first. It didn't hurt that it involved nearly-nude male dancers, who all looked slender and buff! (By contrast, the female dancers looked scrawny and underfed from the front row.) The dancer portraying the slithering Satan did an excellent job.

George Ballanchine had choreographed the third piece, so of course it was beautiful in the sense of modern ballet. "Apollo" involved three muses dancing for the favor of the Greek god. This was CF's favorite.

After a third (!) intermission, we finally saw "Sacre," new choreography to Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring music. CF didn't like it, but I don't think she appreciated the historical significance of it, and I had insufficient vocabulary to explain to her about the riot the choreography caused at the premiere in Paris in 1913. Unfortunately, we know little about the original movements, so this year many companies will be re-choreographing Stravinsky's music to mark the anniversary of the piece. In fact, Dear Husband and I have tickets to attend such a performance here on campus later this semester. At any rate, by that point it was almost 11pm, and I had nearly fallen asleep in my chair.

Taking in a dance or instrumental music performance in a foreign country is of course easier than seeing (and understanding) a play or stand-up comedy routine. What kinds of performance art have you enjoyed while on trips in foreign countries?

Next time: a look at Dresden's past.

Germany West: Bielefeld

My itinerary last month looked something like this: Chicago --> Frankfurt --> Berlin --> Hamburg --> Berlin --> Dresden --> Bielefeld --> Dresden --> Leipzig --> Frankfurt --> Chicago. I have put these photos up under "Germany West," because as with my previous trip, my research took place primarily in old East Germany. I did however make a one-day junket over to the western part of the country, to the University of Bielefeld, in order to hear a paper and to have one of my dissertation chapters discussed. (A research group there also studies the German Hygiene Museum.) In order not to eat into my time at the archives, however, I planned to do all my traveling on the same day, which meant an early morning, a late night, and more time "on the rails" than I actually spent in Bielefeld. For you lovers of all things trains, planes, and automobiles, this is "the train post." (Not all of the photos are from that specific trip.)

S-Bahn in Berlin Hauptbahnhof

Inside a Regional Express traveling through Berlin

My InterCity Express (ICE) train arrives in Berlin!

Berlin Hauptbahnhof

S-Bahn in Hamburg (with person running to catch it)

Christmas decorations in Hamburg Hbf.

"Antique" Strassenbahn cars in Dresden; these run on the E3 line.

Train set in the Dresden Hauptbahnhof. For 1 Euro you can run the trains. I just watched.